"A subtle and universal exploration of identity."—Aida Alami, The New York Times
"The prose shines and the central literary mystery will keep readers turning pages. This beguiling volume captivates." —Publishers Weekly
"A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing." —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Iman Mersal:
"Traces of Enayat [is] a creative nonfiction text that defies categorization, in which [Mersal] continues her investigation of the untold histories of women’s mental health at the intersection of middle-class morality and cultural canon-making. The archive, its gendered composition, and its silences, are for Mersal a constant point of departure and return." —Vina A. Ramadan, BOMB
"The first new poems I've liked for years . . .Unpredictable, savage, chaotic. There is something of Zbigniew Herbert in them, clever, abstract, musing stuff, but they are this year's model, an 'upgrade,' as we would say, with terrifying bleakness in place of his periodic geniality." —Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement
"Mersal doesn’t offer herself as a representative of her country, culture, or religion, and her feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love. Her voice is so inviting, so familiar, so confiding that it’s even easy to forget that these are translations: Creswell renders her as a perfect contemporary . . . To read The Threshold is to be heartened by poem after poem that exhibits the whole woman—heart and mind, candor and cunning." —Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books
[Mersal's poetry] is bracing, clever, and terse, but slippery too. The self is not her subject so much as an impediment that she writes around; there’s deceit, disloyalty, duplicity, misdirection . . . There is an almost joyful sense of privacy in Mersal’s poems: She obscures as much as she discloses." —Amir-Hussein Radjy, The Nation
"This selection, drawn from [Mersal's] first four books and nimbly translated from the Arabic, showcases the sweet, tough verve of her voice." —The New York Times Book Review
"Mersal's poems are many things—sensuous, cerebral, intimate, angry and disorientating. They provide food for thought and elicit laughter in the dark . . . [The Threshold is] a perfect entry point for readers new to her work." —Malcolm Forbes, The National
"Ravishing . . . Mersal’s poems read like short stories; they are spare but resonant, full of charming misfits, and governed by chance." —Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, 4Columns
2024-01-13
One woman’s search to uncover the story of Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-1963), a figure in Egyptian literature who nearly disappeared from the canon.
In 1963, al-Zayyat killed herself just days after hearing publishers were not interested in her novel Love and Silence. Mersal describes the novel’s steadfast contemporary relevance, its “feminist ‘consciousness,’” and how “you sense the ponderous influence of contemporary romance novels, but elsewhere it is modern, strange, limpid, and beyond categorization.” Yet the novel is “entirely absent from every history of twentieth century Egyptian and Arabic literature.” In this sharp investigation, Mersal fights against al-Zayyat’s erasure, piecing together the author’s short life and illuminating Egypt’s literary scene and the many societal difficulties faced by a young creative woman in the 1960s. Mersal writes like a detective who lets their case get personal: She calls al-Zayyat’s tragedy “seductive” and recognizes the obsession in her own research. “It had begun to dawn on me that I wasn’t fully in control of myself,” she acknowledges. “I was writing these long emails and sending them out the way some people put a message in a bottle and cast it into the sea: not because they want it to be found, but because they will do anything they can to sleep.” The author traces her leads back as far as she can, and her exhaustive research often sidelines her storytelling. For example, the discovery of a renamed street sparks a sluice of records from the city-planning and surveying offices, and Mersal introduces an investigation of al-Zayyat’s kindergarten with the story of a wartime freighter docking in Alexandria. Excessively thorough, Mersal eventually reveals secrets about her subject’s depression and unhappy marriage, reframing the book into a profound work that is more about al-Zayyat’s mental health than about her being simply a curiosity of world literature.
A resonant literary biography by way of fractured, obsessive sleuthing.
